Andrew Marvell at 400

It's 400 years since the birth of poet, satirist, politician (and spy?) Andrew Marvell: in today's post, Hari Collins reflects on the writer's work.  

T.S. Eliot wrote that Andrew Marvell’s most characteristic quality was ‘wit’, which Eliot defined as ‘a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’. Like most of Eliot’s judgements, this is stimulating but basically wrong. For there is something more important beneath the tough reasonableness – a universal disgust, an horror of the world and all the chaos, violence and disorder it contains. This disgust is always expressed in polite terms, which leads to a strange experience of dissonance in the reading of Marvell's poetry, akin to talking to a person who is very obviously highly repressed. Like many such people, Marvell flees into a world of perfect art, of Platonic love, elegant gardens and music, which does not contain the upsets of ordinary life – and again like many such people he finds the order and remoteness of this world as unsatisfying as the real one. Thus in the end, Marvell’s disgust becomes absolutely all-consuming, and no refuge seems possible. Marvell gives us a subtle vision of hell; beneath the reasonable Metaphysical poet is a melodramatist.

Marvell’s hatred of the world at large has a resemblance to more conventional laments about decay, ephemerality or the unquiet of the world. These lines from ‘The Garden’, for instance, are an expression of a poetic commonplace - that society is full of ambition, toil and sin and that the only relief for the mind is the solitude of some form of nature:

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here

And Innocence thy Sister dear!

Mistaken long, I sought you then

In busy companies of men,

Similarly, the lines from the end of ‘Upon Appleton House’, whilst striking in their rhetorical fire, express the conventional view that the world is a place of chaos and confusion:

‘Tis not, what it once was, the World

But a rude heap together hurl’d;

All negligently overthrown,

Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone.

This section does have great force, particularly in the list of geographical elements which constitute the last line, and which suggest a barren wasteland without connexion or order. But basically the sentiment is commonplace. What is distinctive about Marvell is the peculiarly disgusted slant which he gives to this received attitude, of which the weary but bombastic tone of the last extract is an intimation. 

This attitude is perhaps most famously seen in ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Here, the familiar idea that the imminence of death means that one should seize the pleasure which comes to you, usually as in this instance of a sexual nature, and the use of this idea to exhort others to sleep with one, is evoked in the lines ‘then [in the grave] worms shall try/ That long-preserved virginity’. These lines, as many commentators have pointed out, have undertones of loathing for the woman who is ostensibly beloved; the speaker feels a horrified pleasure at the thought of worms succeeding where he has failed, using a grotesque image which connects the sensuality of the woman with the creatures of the soil. Although the poem swiftly turns from this mood to an exhortation to seize the day, the tone of the rest is coloured by the impression this section gives that the speaker is partially revolted by his own lust and that there is something of a relief in the thought that it will turn to ‘ashes’; better the grave, that ‘fine and private place’, than the ‘instant fires’ of desire. Of course this is not the main thrust of the poem – but it is a vital counter-current.

In other poems the feeling of disgust at the chaos, confusion and disorder of the world is more elaborated than in ‘To His Coy Mistress’. But the ‘unusual Hearts’, as Marvell calls them – creatures such as worms, grasshoppers, frogs and snakes – recur as symbols of disorder. They usually do so in an image which appears in ‘Upon Appleton House’, ‘Damon the Mower’ and ‘The Mower’s Song’ and seems to sum up everything which Marvell found so equivocally frightening about the disorder of the world: the image of mowers scything through a field of wheat. The image of the mower has a number of attractions for Marvell. First, it has traditional associations both of the pastoral and of death, the great mower; these associations Marvell constantly exploits, and thus suggests that death and disaster stalk everywhere, even in the most apparently peaceful settings. The Damon who gives his love, with whimsical pastoral fancy, ‘Chameleons changing-hue/ And Oak leaves tipt with honey-dew’, and who proclaims that ‘on me the Morn her dew distills/ Before her darling Daffadils’, can, disappointed in love, go ‘depopulating all the ground’, scythe himself in his own ankle and exclaim that ‘Death thou art a mower too’.

But it is in ‘Upon Appleton House’ that Marvell most fully explores the possibilities of this form of imagery, and where, under the cover of polite praise of a stately home, he elaborates a vision of universal and constant terror. The first type of fear he evokes is that of the ‘Abyss’ which is constituted by ‘that Unfathomable Grass’ – literally speaking, the grass is higher than a person, but it stands for a world where human beings are entirely out of place and which is thus incomprehensible, where ‘Grashoppers are Gyants’ and ‘ in squeaking Laugh contemn’ us for being below them. This is the nightmare of disorder, where the entire natural order of things is topsy-turvy and the little laugh at the great. The upsetting of distinctions renders the social world unintelligible, and it thus appears as if the field were ‘under Water’, dark and dangerous, a place from which it is scarcely credible that humans should return alive. And yet this is not the only form of hell – human beings can do as well as nature. They attempt to tame this incomprehensible nature: thus the mowers are ‘tawny’, like ‘Israelites’ forging a path through the Red Sea; they are strong, primaeval, akin to the law-giver Moses in their division of the ‘Grassy Deeps’ and consequent creation of order out of chaos, the Promised Land out of the desert. Yet this creation of order demands a ‘Massacre’, and not just of grass; a ‘Rail’ is carved, ‘unknowing’ by a scythe, and although the mower detests ‘the Edge all bloody from its Breast’, death is an inevitable result of the great demolition and reordering which the mowers have undertaken. Furthermore, it is not an wholly undesirable one, for the rail is made into ‘cates’, or food, by ‘bloody Thestylis’, who then proceeds to catch another bird and crack a distasteful joke about how rails have substituted for quails in the mowers’ Israelite progress. Then the bird is reprimanded for building its nest low down; those foolish enough to get in the way of great exploits will inevitably be destroyed, despite the lack of ill-will on the part of the destroyers.

Thus the apparently virtuous destruction, meant to bring forth new life, which has been performed by the mower is revealed, once he ‘commands the Field’, as a mere ‘Camp of Battail’, which ‘Lyes quilted ore with Bodies slain’ and is the sight of ‘Pillaging’. What started in idealism has ended in universal slaughter and the mere taking of loot, and thus the dances of the ‘careless Victors’ seem obscene because they have been achieved at the cost of so much – that the ‘Females’ are as ‘fragrant as the Mead’ seems a confirmation of their sinister nature, since it was they who were doing the ‘Pillaging’. Unnoticed by these raucous victors are the mounds of hay which Marvell compares to the pyramids on the ‘Desert Memphis Sand’ or the hills raised in Roman camps in memory of the dead – solemn memorials to the departed, only seen in the comparative tranquility of those going by on boats which ‘among them safely steer’. The entire scene is, apparently, an unmitigated tragedy.

And yet, despite all the suffering, it really did make things new again, it really was necessary to remove the ‘Abyss’ and create a fresh start, with a ‘new and empty Face of things’. The field appears to be akin to ‘The World when first created’, innocent and fresh. But that is not quite right either. For in fact it is more like ‘the Toril/ Ere the Bulls enter at Madrid’. This refers to the literal presence of cows on the mown grass, but also to a place cleaned again for yet further slaughter. The cow itself is similarly an agent of death for the field – it cuts the grass even closer than the scythe and is referred to as ‘the Beast’. We are now in a new nightmare, that of a desolate wasteland, so ordered that there is nothing left at all except endless carnage, and cows akin to ‘Fleas’ reflected in ‘Multiplying Glasses’ or spots on faces. We have reached another form of topsy-turvy disorder; the field is a ‘Landskip drawen in Looking-Glass’, a terrible opposite to what ought to be. And finally, we complete the cycle when the field is flooded; having ‘seem’d before’ to be underwater, it now actually is. We have the same ‘Paradox’ as at the beginning, of eels consorting with oxes, leeches with horses, of boats going over bridges and salmons trespassing over land – of everything once more incomprehensible and strange. This, then, is a picture of the cycle of the harvest, and by extension the world, as a never-ending cycle of desolation, where the only alternatives are a profuse variety, a ‘rude heap together hurl’d’ which one cannot possibly understand, and a complete desolation, ‘Deserts, Precipices, Stone’, which is vile, brutish and utterly dead. These alternatives succeed one another constantly.

There must be a way out of this terrible opposition. Marvell finds one only in retreat from the world and into the realm of art, broadly considered – that is the realm of the artificial, where the demands of order and the demands of vitality can be reconciled in a perfect arrangement – or similar places such as his own mind or, occasionally, nature. The most famous example of this is in ‘The Garden’, which has a perfect combination of tranquility and life, echoing ‘that happy Garden-state’ from which the world has fallen. The implied opposition here is not just to ‘busie Companies of Men’, but to untamed Nature; here she is decent, there wild. But it is not all good order; there is ‘Fair quiet’ and ‘Innocence, her sister dear’, in this world, but also ‘ripe Apples’, ‘Nectaren’, the ‘curious Peach’, the ‘Luscious cluster of the Vine’ which presses itself into Marvell’s mouth, melons which he trips up on and flowers which ensnare him – the garden is voluptuous and sensory as well as tranquil. But the sensuality here is transfigured, no longer full of ‘our Passions heat’, just as Daphne became a laurel and Syrinx a reed because Apollo and Pan chased after them; Marvell comically suggests that the gods chased these nymphs to gain the plant, not the woman, and thus presents the tranquil sensuality of plants as superior to the ‘instant fires’ of lust. For, encouraged by this tranquil stimulation of the senses, the mind ‘withdraws into its happiness’ and creates ‘far other Worlds, and other Seas’, which can yet all be annihilated to ‘a green Thought in a green Shade’. In ‘The Garden’, therefore, we see a perfect balance; the reach of fancy is unlimited, but it is always under control; quietude can always be easily reached, because the soul is as free to ‘glide’ as a bird with ‘silver wind’, abstracted from the body and sitting in the boughs of a tree.

Other poems create similar visions of perfect but vital order – in ‘Clorinda and Damon’ it is music consecrated to Pan, which is, in a strangely haunting fashion, perhaps due to the great simplicity of the language, vaunted as superior to the delights of physical world; ‘Musicks Empire’ similarly extols music, the ‘Mosaique of the Air’; ‘The Definition of Love’ shows, in the utter perfection of its form and diction, the similar perfection of a type of love which is purified by its inability to be satisfied. Yet even in ‘The Definition of Love', there is an awareness of the inadequacy of this order, for of course the fact that the love cannot be satisfied renders it useless just as much as perfect. Marvell overcomes the tension with the wonderful metaphors of the poem, particularly the lines about how the loves of the poet and his beloved are like perfect parallel lines which, ‘though infinite, can never meet’. Despite the reconciliation afforded by art, however, the awareness that order is ultimately dissociated from life is present in ‘The Definition of Love’. Marvell allows the full ironic play of this notion in ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’. He praises the ‘simplicity’ with which the nymph ‘begins her golden daies’ – but then immediately shows us that she is not as simple as we might be inclined to suspect. For she ‘tames/ the wilder flowers, and gives them names’ – this is not someone frolicking care-free in nature, but overmastering it, in a manner which is both comic – witness her informing the roses ‘what colour best becomes them, and what smell’ – and also faintly worrying in its hubris. The following stanzas oscillate curiously between genuine admiration for this girl and a wariness about the potential vanity of her concern to ‘reform the errours of the Spring’ – a very strange idea – of which it is very difficult to gauge the seriousness. Certainly the last verse admonishes Little T.C. not to be too taken with reforming zeal and pick the buds – otherwise Flora will, Marvell warns, kill her in revenge. This sudden intrusion of a deeply discordant note seems to be reminding us that despite any order we try to impose upon nature, it is capricious and can do as it pleases, that its revenge is likely to be absurdly out of proportion to our offences, and that being too rigid, too concern for rules and order, is therefore futile. The order of ‘The Garden’, where all the flowers will certainly have been given names, is therefore in this poem slightly suspect.

The goddess Flora, from Botticelli's 'Primavera'

This undermining of the very ‘decent order tame’ which Marvell prizes so highly as a refuge from the carnage of the world is continued much more violently in two other poems. The more explicit and for that reason less interesting of these is ‘The Mower Against Gardens’, where a mower figure attacks gardens as unnatural, comparing man to a ‘Tyrant’ making ‘forbidden mixtures’ between plants, and protests that ‘The Gods themselves with us [in the wilds, the countryside] do dwell’; real nature is vigorous and pure not artificial and ordered. But the most intriguing manifestations of this sentiment are in ‘Upon Appleton House’. This is first seen in the description of the flower-gardens which surround the house, and which are compared to ‘Bastions’, who fire out ‘fragrant Volleys’ every time their ‘Governour’ or “Governess’ passes, who appear to be standing in regiments at a parade. Certainly, a military parade is an apt image of disciplined but extravagantly colourful arrangement – but the basic peculiarity of such a metaphor for a garden is more than slight. Surely an army is far too strictly ordered a body to be an appropriate comparison. Marvell then immediately forces us to recognise this when he laments that these gardens are not, as they once were, the only military forces in the country – in a time of Civil War real ‘Towrs’, ‘Garrisons’ and ‘Switzers’ are very much evident. Of course, Marvell wishes to emphasise the contrast between the real and the metaphorical battalions, but like all such contrasts, this also draws attention to the distressing similarities. Marvell seems to be asking whether a flower garden is similar, in its concentrated order designed to achieve an artificial, possibly pernicious aesthetic intensity, to the order of a regiment neatly arranged so as to do the maximum damage. It is a melodramatic comparison, but a disturbing one nonetheless.

Thomas Fairfax, and his daughter Mary

However, the greatest opposition to order under the cover of seeming praise for it occurs later in the poem, when Marvell is apparently making an encomium to the daughter of the house, Mary. This woman is apparently so virtuous that, like Little T.C., she can correct nature – but the correction which Marvell is supposed to be praising is portrayed in frankly horrifying terms. Before her, everything compacts, vitrifies, stills – the air becomes ‘viscous’, the stream is ‘gellying’, and fishes remain motionless in the water, like ‘Flies in Chrystal’. Marvell says that she gives to the gardens her ‘wondrous Beauty’, but the previous lines read more as if, by making Nature ‘benum’ itself, by creating a tranquillity so absolute as to not allow for any life, she has killed the gardens. Thus we might doubt the wisdom of making the gardens more ‘Pure, Sweet, Streight and Fair’. This is not what Marvell himself recommends – the ostensible thrust of this section of the poem is in favour of this deadening purification. But that is because Marvell’s desire for order, his horror of the carnage which was exemplified earlier in the poem by the actions of the mowers, is so strong. This does not mean he does not also recognise that the satisfaction of this desire would come with grave costs.

Thus it appears that Marvell’s universal nausea has finally turned on himself; the cure is as terrifying as the disease. Chaos is too frightening, desolation too drear and art too remote to satisfy, and thus the outlook seems hopeless. The generality of this attitude of rejection is perhaps connected to a part of Marvell’s work which I have not touched upon in this essay: his extensive satirical writings. Notoriously, effective satire can undermine everything and leave its practitioner with little more than pure rage. Marvell was a very effective, and very angry satirist, and in the consequences this may have had for his temperament – indeed in his whole obsessive concern with order and disgust at the world – he looks forward to the eighteenth century, and particularly to Jonathan Swift; the Swift of the Yahoos, but even more the Swift of ‘Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’. Yet we should give Eliot his due – Marvell does have a ‘tough reasonableness’ somewhere in him, and this can lead to a resolving laughter at all such violently alienated attitudes to the world. The penultimate stanza of ‘Upon Appleton House’, which is quoted above, is a despairing protest at the ‘rude heap together hurl’d’ which constitutes the world in Marvell’s eyes. Yet the final stanza is the following:

But now the Salmon-Fishers moist

Their Leathern Boats begin to hoist;

And, like Antipodes in Shoes,

Have shod their Heads in their Canoos.

How Tortoise like, but not so slow,

These rational Amphibii go?

Let’s in: for the dark Hemisphere

Does now like one of them appear.

That image contains all the topsy-turvy-ness of which Marvell has been so bitterly complaining, and yet the tone is of wryly amused response to the quaint and picturesque. The anger at the world is not effaced by this stanza, nor by the refuges of art, love and horticulture which Marvell celebrates in other poems, but they do provide a temporary respite. That necessary function, of embodying perfection despite external chaos and confusion, is one which his own poetry also triumphantly performs.